Chapter 170: Reconciliation

Ryn POV

When the chamber is empty except for the three of us, Isolde finally speaks.

"You don't have to drag it out," she says to Zevran. "I confessed in openly so I know what the penalty is. I watched you hand it to Mordain an hour ago. I'm not going to make you find a gentler word for me than you found for him."

"You'd hang quietly," Zevran says.

She lifts her chin. "Five hundred years and I finally did the one thing I'm not ashamed of. I'll gladly take whatever punishment you give me."

And I hear myself speak before I've decided to, the same way I always have, except this time I mean it all the way down.

"No," I say. "She lives."

Both of them look at me. Isolde's face does something complicated.

"Ryn," she says. "You don't owe me... You don't have to..."

"I'm not doing it because I owe you. I'm doing it because you're the only person in this entire court who ever paid for me with something that cost them." I step toward her. "You poisoned me. You wanted him dead. You stood in that doorway and watched a man come to kill him while I bled myself white to stop it. I know exactly what you are. And then you walked into a room you knew would hang you and you took down the men who built a hearing to erase me, because you decided protecting me was worth your own neck." My voice doesn't shake. "I vouched for you once before because I was too trusting to know better. I'm vouching for you now because I know exactly what you did and I'm doing it anyway. That's the difference."

Zevran is watching me, and there's something in his face I can't possibly name, but I can it's all his emotions at once.

"She committed treason," he says, but his tone isn't sounding like a refusal, it's him making me say the rest.

"She did. So she doesn't walk free." I turn to Isolde. "You wanted to be the one who stays. That's what you told yourself for five hundred years, isn't it. The loyal one. The one who's always here." I see it land. "So you don't get to stay. That's the price. Your seat, your place as his second, the court you spent five centuries inside, all of it gone. You'll live, but you live somewhere else."

The chamber is very quiet.

Isolde looks at me for a long moment, and the expressionless look she usually wears cracks, just once, just at the edges.

"That's even crueler than I expected," she says quietly.

"I know. That's why it's fair."

She almost smiles. It's the closest to real I've ever seen her. "You've grown teeth, Ryn. Somewhere between the cellar and here." She inclines her head, the courtier's bow, the last one she'll give in this chamber. "Stripped and exiled. I accept it. It's more than I'd have given me." She looks at Zevran one final time, and whatever five hundred years held in that look, she let's it go away.

Then she walks out of the chamber she helped run for half a millennium, and doesn't look back.

I find Seraphina in the corridor outside, because of course she's waiting. She always knows where to be.

She's dressed in loose pants and a long coat, almost as though she's travelling. There's a small case at her feet and on her face is the look of a woman who's already left and is just doing me the courtesy of the goodbye.

"I'm so sorry that your father's house is finished," I say. "I tried to save you but couldn't."

"My father's house was finished the moment Mordain's was. We were tied together. Where he goes, we go." She says it plainly, just the way you would state the weather. "I told you I was finished, Ryn. I have made peace with it weeks ago. I'm only surprised it took this long to arrive."

"Where will you go?"

"Somewhere no one's heard of either of my names. Somewhere I can be a person instead of a position." her lips curve into a thin smile. "You gave me the idea, actually. All that time you spent being someone other than what this court decided you were. I thought, if the human can do it, surely a vampire of my talents can manage."

I don't know what to say to her. She was my enemy, then she was the one who warned me about Isolde, then she was the one person who held me on the worst night, and I never once figured out which of those was the real Seraphina, and now she's leaving before I can.

"The thing you did," I say. "Telling Zevran about us. Using it against me."

"I wanted to try one last time. She picks up the case. "I'm not going to apologize for the parts of me that survived. But I'll tell you the true thing, since I'm leaving and it costs me nothing now. The night you came to me wasn't planned. It was the only honest hour I had in this whole rotten court, and you gave it to me. I've decided to leave being grateful for it instead of bitter about the rest. That's new for me. You should feel flattered."

I do, strangely. "Will I see you again?"

"No," she says, gently. "I think it's for the best that I remain a thing that happened to you here, Ryn. Let me stay that way." She adjusts the case in her hand, and for a moment her usually polished selfvslips and there's just a tired woman under it. "Do you know the cruelest part of thirty years in this court? I forgot I had a face of my own. Every expression I wore was to do something to someone. You're the only person I ever stopped pretending for, and I didn't even decide to, it just happened, somewhere between hating you and not. I'll carry that wherever I land. The memory of being a real person for one night, with you."

"That's almost... I don't know what to say, Seraphina."

"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation to ruin slowly, on my own terms, somewhere new."

She studies my face one last time, and something almost soft crosses hers. "Be careful with the king. He loves you the way drowning men love air, and that kind of love makes men do things they don't tell you about. There are secrets in him you haven't found yet. Mind you find them before they find you."

And then she's gone down the corridor with her one small case, the daughter of a fallen house walking out of the only world she's ever known.

I stand there a long time after.

She warned me. Secrets in him you haven't found yet. And somewhere under everything, I remember Zevran stopping mid-sentence in his study, the thing he started to tell me about the Borderlands before Eldridge opened the door.

I don't overthinke it because there's been enough drama for today. I know he'll tell me once the time is right.